Tag Archives: Pause Fest

Last week Nakama Melbourne visited the city’s premier Digital, Tech & Design innovation event Pause Fest, where our very own Social Media and SEO Specialist Consultant, Maggie Partsi was representing her side project “VibeDate” among the start-up exhibitors.

Pause Fest brings together Australia’s brightest minds in the digital space to showcase over 3 days ideas, knowledge, thought leaders & products that are putting the land down under among the forefront of the technology – in essence a creative environment to foster new ideas! We were able to get a few shots of the day and attend some great sessions delivered by the likes of Sina Krisse from Yoke, Tony Lees from Ntegrity and Gavin Becker from Clemenger BBDO.

PEOPLE POWER

Envato’s HR Director, James Law hosted a presentation around ‘People Power’ and creating experiences your talent will love. It was great hearing how a company voted ‘Coolest Tech Co. 2015’ and ‘Coolest Co. for Women 2015’ attract and retain staff.

Three key take away points from his presentation were:

The only thing that matters is relationships

Place focus on trust this needs to be the “default” and flow through the entire business

Focus on output not input

SURVIVING AND THRIVING THROUGH BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

Presented by:

Sina Kresse, Yoke

Tony Lee, Ntergrity

Mark Cowan, Acorn Brands

Sina said perfectly that “Digital business transformation is not that hard” and the adoption of it should be approached with this mindset.

They identified that businesses fall into three groups when it comes to digital transformation:

The Dead (or laggers): This defines more than half of Australian businesses (67%), this can be mostly attributed to not having the right culture in place.

The Try Hard (or barely surviving):

“Most business’ fail at digital branding”

It’s a digital jungle out there and to be successful you need to self educate, be proactive and be hungry to learn.

You have to keep learning, educate the leaders in your business, become industry experts and give back and share the knowledge.

The Savvy Operators (or the thriving)

What sets the Savvy apart from the rest?

Robust strategy = Drives innovation = Success

These companies are humble and are not scared to go back 3 steps if something is not working.

Focus for the stage of transformation is to create a shared language!

A brilliant point made by Sina, something that really resonates with me working in the digital space, I too believe that we need to standardise the language, titles and roles in digital to avoid confusion and replication of titles and roles.

Tony Lee of NTegrity also gave an excellent overview of the digital space in Australia, from pace to adoption, to how the space can respond to the digital talent shortage:

“In the last two years we have seen more change in marketing then in the last two decades”

“Digital is moving and evolving faster then the industry can keep up”

My favourite quote of the day was “Digital Distress” – I absolutely love this and have been using it a lot this week – it’s my new buzzword (for anything digitally distressing…)

Tony also spoke about the talent shortage in the market and how we should be educating the teachers not just the students, which I agree with 100%.

How Creativity is driving innovation in Australia

BBDO clients were among the open table discussions, with big name clients on board like: Mars Petcare, Drinkwise, Visit Victoria and TAC.

Moderator was Gavin Becker, Creative Technologist at BBDO spoke about the importance of creativity in producing solutions and customers today having a ‘voracious appetite for new content’.

It was great seeing and hearing from BBDO’s clients on how the campaigns were successful and the results they achieved for them. I really loved the Mars Petcare app ‘Found’, a brilliant use of mobile tech that helps owners find a lost pet – the uptake by owners was incredible and subsequently they won a lot of awards and received recognition for the app – of course I downloaded it while I was listening to the presentation, and it has my seal of approval.